City of Endless Night

"A consistently exciting and never predictable series."- -Associated Press When Grace Ozmian, the beautiful and reckless daughter of a wealthy tech billionaire, first goes missing, the NYPD assumes she has simply sped off on another wild adventure. Until the young woman's body is discovered in an abandoned warehouse in Queens, the head nowhere to be found. Lieutenant CDS Vincent D'Agosta quickly takes the lead. He knows his investigation will attract fierce scrutiny, so D'Agosta is delighted when FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast shows up at the crime scene assigned to the case. "I feel rather like Brer Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch," Pendergast tells D'Agosta, "because I have found you here, in charge. Just like when we first met, back at the Museum of Natural History." But neither Pendergast nor D'Agosta are prepared for what lies ahead. A diabolical presence is haunting the greater metropolitan area, and Grace Ozmian was only the first of many victims to be murdered . . . and decapitated. Worse still, there's something unique to the city itself that has attracted the evil eye of the killer. As mass hysteria sets in, Pendergast and D'Agosta find themselves in the crosshairs of an opponent who has threatened the very lifeblood of the city. It'll take all of Pendergast's skill to unmask this most dangerous foe-let alone survive to tell the tale.

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Pendergast had fallen into a most uncharacteristic emotional state. But as the days and weeks went on, and the voices that sounded in his head grew still one by one, a single voice remain --- a voice, he knew, that was at the heart of his strange disquiet.
‘Can you love me the way I wish you to? The way I need you to?’

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He knew from his Chongg Ran training that the thoughts you most try to banish are the ones that most persistently push themselves back in. The best way to not think of something is to possess it fully, and then cultivate indifference.
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Her accent had a pleasing susurrus of Slavic overlain with an ugly Queens drawl.
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“Isn’t he grieving?”
“Sure, in his own way. If his personal life is anything like his business life, seems to me his way of grieving would be to find the perp, whittle him alive, then make a bow tie out of his junk and hand him with it.”

She was Portuguese, it seemed, with antique notions of honor, vengeance, and loyalty, whose ancestors had been involved in Machiavellian intrigue for eight hundred years.
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I would submit to you that the apparent lack of motive might in fact, be motive itself.
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One: Information posing an undue risk to the personal safety of members of the department, victims, or others. Two: Information that may interfere with police operations. And Three: Information that adversely affects the rights of an accused or the investigation or prosecution of a crime.
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--you couldn’t hack a dead bolt.
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This is sheer defamation. I’ll sue you to within an inch of your life.
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… had to make many difficult business decisions in the course of a day, and to compensate he organized the rest of his life to be as decision-free as possible – starting with breakfast.
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After some back and forth, they ultimately agreed on okonomiyaki pancakes with yam batter, octopus, and pork belly.

This theory that we’ve got some kind of crusading psycho out there, raining down judgement on the wicked, has really struck a chord. You know that, right? A lot of people in this town – important people – are getting nervous. And there are others cheering the killer on like some kind of serial-killer Robin Hood. We can’t have this threat to the social fabric. This is not Keokuk or Pocatello: this is New York, where we have everyone under the sun finally living in harmony, enjoying the lowest crime rate f any big city in America.
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“My dear Vincent, Sisyphus would be proud.”
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… one of those anti-government types who believed that 9/11 was perpetuated by the Bushes, that the Newtown massacre was a hoax, and that the Federal Reserve and a cabal of international bankers secretly ran the world and were in a conspiracy to take away his guns.

Look what’s happened to our city, the corrupt wealth pouring in from overseas, the fifty- and hundred-million-dollar apartments, the billionaires walling themselves off in their gilded palaces. New York City used to be a place where everyone, rich and poor, rubbed shoulders and got along. Now the uber-rich are taking over our city, stomping on the rest of us.
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“What else is there to a murder than the who, why, and how?”
“My dear Vincent, there’s the where.”

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… thousands of “colonels,” trying to land them as “clients,” although the more appropriate word … might be suckers. Every boiler room caller had to sign up at least eight clients a day, forty a week --- or be fired.

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And this phrase you used in the last piece, City of Endless Night. That was good. Damn good. Turn it into a kind of mantra, work it into every piece.

LFX would identify the widow of a vet who’s living in a nice house, fully paid off. They’d persuade her to take out a small reverse mortgage. No big deal, done all the time. But then LFX would force a default on the reverse mortgage for some bogus reason: nonpayment of homeowner’s insurance or some other trumped-up or trivial violation of terms, Just enough of an excuse to take the house, sell it, and keep an obscene amount of the proceeds as late fees, fines, interest, penalties, and other jacked-up charges.”
“In other words, these two were the scum of the earth, …”
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“The blood on the ceiling. That’s sixteen feet. It shot straight up, arterial jetting. In order for it to reach that height, their heart rate and blood pressure must’ve been sky-high.”

Chapter 40 – highly quotable on three-star Michelin restaurant workings
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…like King Mithridates, who had taken increasing does of poison until he no longer susceptible to its effects, xxyyzz no longer cared a whit about his reputation.
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… dressed in spectacular Nigerian kitenge dress …
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Chapter 35 – many quotables on the making of a former Jesuit priest.
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…a twenty-first-century bonfire of the vanities. And what better place to do it than New York City, the Florence of the modern world, the city of billionaires and bums, the richest and the poorest, the midnight playground of the rich and the midnight pit of despair of the poor.
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“Down With the One Percenters!”
“Decapitate Corporate Greedsters!”
“Who Owns You?”
“Welcome To The New Bonfire of The Vanities.”
“The Best Thing in Life Aren’t “’Things’.”
“Consumerism is a Fatal Illness.”

“Consider a man who had everything to live for,” he said, busying himself at the worktable,” nice home, beautiful wife, great career, happiness, success and prosperity – and then the bastard ripped all that away. So do I win first prize in the hatred category? Yeah, I probably do. Guess I’m your man.”
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“That’s right. It’s called a hostile takeover.”
“Forgive my ignorance. In matter of business, I’m not but a child. Is this the case with most of your takeovers? That they are hostile?”
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The anti-one-percenter demonstrations … the biggest one had gathered around the towering new structure at 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the world, where apartments were selling for up to a hundred million dollars each.
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Unfortunately, my usual bag of tricks didn't get me past his retinue of toadies, lawyers, lick-spittles, bodyguards, lackeys, and other impediments.

On the other hand, as he scanned the floor he noted there were already tracks everywhere, crisscrossing this way and that, laid down by urban archaeologists and those people called “creepers” who made a hobby of exploring dangerous, abandoned buildings.
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Silicon Valley casual chic – the black T-shirts and linen jackets with skinny jeans and those Spanish shoes that were all the rage --- what were they called? Pikolinos.
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…a family gone wrong thanks to too much money, too many ex-wives, too much dysfunction.
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…as the searched him, uncovering the spare magazine along with several knives, lock picks and bump keys, a garrote, two cell phones, money, some test tubes and tweezers, and a single-shot derringer.
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A trap intended for him; but traps sometimes worked both ways.
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Pendergast gave an almost convulsive shudder. “Challenge,” he repeated. “But of course.”

Sui generis (Latin: in a class by itself.)
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“Sic transit Gloria mund”
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I’m afraid I’ve developed an unfortunate reputation at the Bureau as an agent whose perps end up dead…
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The right supramarginal gyrus (the part of the brain that is responsible for empathy and compassion.)
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He was a man who had run out of ideas as well as rounds. At some point he would do what all hunted animals did in the end: stop running, turn, and make his final stand.
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‘…enjoy the rest of Building 93, but stay out of wing D. Don’t forget the immortal words of the greatest creepers of them all: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.’
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Yes: changed the game from chess to a game of …craps. A game of chance.
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…the look of defeat had changed; there was something even worse in those eyes now, a kind of existential despair.

“Vincent, it isn’t the content of one’s bank account that’s important, it’s the content of one’s character, to paraphrase a wise man. The divide between the wealthy and everyone else is a false dichotomy – and one that obscures the real problems: there are many wicked people in the world, rich and poor. That is the real divide pp between those who strive to do good, and those who strive only for themselves. Money magnifies the harm the wealthy can do, of course, allowing them to parade their vulgarity and malfeasance in full view of the rest of us.”
“So what’s the answer?”
“To paraphrase another wise man, ‘The rich will always be with us.’ There is no answer, except to make sure we wealthy are not allowed to use our money as a tool of oppression and subversion of democracy.”
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“Some things I wish I could unsee.”
“To be a witness to evil is to be human.”

Comment

LOL! with the details in the description (Summary) or the Kirkus Reviews, the spoiler-police would surely blank them out if posted by library readers. Anyway, Pendergast was back in NYC, missing the forever young Constance who was away with "the boy" (The Obsidian Chamber), his friend D'Agosta came knocking and literally begged for his help in a high profile murder investigation. With the exception of the initial case, enjoyed how readers were afforded the footsteps of the killer(s) during the most unusual kill(s). Appreciate how the authors painted the antagonist as a genuine genius nutcase with massive resources that made the events plausible; perhaps with the exception on the preservation of paper files, a game changer. The body counts piled up as Pendergast worked the case halfheartedly, missing Constance all the while, until... Surprised and glad that the authors engaged their thoughts on the debate on “one percenters” since Pendergast is clearly one. A page turner: enjoyable, easy read (very few archaic phrases and words.)